Is Ocado’s robotic warehouse the grocery of the future?

Dive Brief:

U.K.-based Ocado has no physical presence in the retail sector, yet in a few short years, according to an article in MIT Technology Review and the company’s own web site, its delivery business has zoomed to 67,000 deliveries in a single day.

The grocer’s warehouse is heavily automated, with robots that shelve and move products to human pickers and packers. Separate computers optimize delivery routes.

A second warehouse, which will double the company’s capacity and use even more swarms of robots to prepare orders, is under construction. A third is in the pipeline.

Dive Insight:

In 1984, coincidentally the title of a George Orwell novel, the A&P supermarket launched what it thought was a forward-looking supermarket concept called the Future Store.